Billion-dollar video game: is this the most expensive piece of entertainment ever made?
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How player-funded development launched a multiplayer game of galactic proportions – and costs – in Star Citizen. How much does it cost to make a video game? The development expenses of blockbuster games are closely guarded business secrets, but they have been climbing ever higher over the years towards big Hollywood-style spending.
![[The Star Citizen website, showing ships for sale.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c842b3456dbbd02cdaec5ce92ad87e2db369d086/0_0_3512_1716/master/3512.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Industry leaks have exposed how the budgets of major video games are spiralling upwards: $100m, or $200m, even more. One of the bestselling franchises, Call of Duty, saw costs balloon to $700m (£573m), a number only revealed recently when a reporter dug into court filings.
There is, however, one game with a budget that is anything but secret. The sprawling multiplayer space simulator Star Citizen publishes its funds on its website and they are updated in real-time. Currently, they stand at $777,145,107 (a figure that will be out of date as soon as this article is published). Soon it’ll surpass $800m and, possibly in a year or so, breach the ceiling to become the world’s first billion-dollar video game.
Unless beaten to it by another huge game – and there are a few of those in production, although their costs are likely to remain undisclosed – that would make it the single most expensive piece of entertainment ever produced. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the priciest movie ever made, cost roughly half that.
Star Citizen’s figures are publicly available because it is not investors that are funding this game, but the players themselves. “Fandom is at the beating heart of Star Citizen,” says Rhys Elliott, a games industry analyst at the London-based market research firm, MIDiA Research. “It’s more of a movement than a game. There’s a mutual commitment between the developers and the players to make something cool and revolutionary – something that hasn’t been done before.”.
